


Weather Patterns

by stackcats



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gender or Sex Swap, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 07:55:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2060124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stackcats/pseuds/stackcats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uozumi on tumblr prompted me for fem!Malcolm/fem!Jamie + weather</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weather Patterns

1. 

It's a freak squall of wind that blows them together. It comes out of nowhere, banging doors, rattling windows, knocking over old grannies and tugging pushchairs and trollies, newspapers, shopping bags, and umbrellas, sending them all tumbling and bumbling away down the street.

 

Jaimee is too small to be dealing with this shit. She hunches her shoulders and barrels towards the nearest doorway, which, unfortunately, turns out to be a dank-smelling pub. Just the sort of place a good wee Catholic girl knows she'll get a bloody good hiding if anyone finds her there.

 

Coming out of the doorway is a flurry of cigarette smoke, the smell of stale booze, and a tall, skinny girl with short-shorn hair, several earrings, and a nose piercing. The girl peers down at her.

 

"The fuck's happening out here?" she asks. Then she frowns. "What's with the fucking tie? Don't tell me - fucking Catholic school?"

 

Jaimee shrugs. She's never seen anybody with a nose piercing, and though the girls at school say fuck all the time, they only do it to piss the nuns off. A couple of years ago, you were cool if you could get them to come after you and slap you round the back of the legs with a ruler, but now there's less slapping, more talk of expulsion.

 

Jaimee knows exactly what her dad'll do if she gets expelled, and the ruler will seem like a blessing in comparison.

 

"You need me," the girl announces, just as Jaimee is considering poking her nose to see if the silver ball is a stick-on. "Get inside."

 

"That's a pub," Jaimee says.

 

"Yeah. You're eighteen, it's fine."

 

"I'm sixt-"

 

"You're indoctrinated into the world's most anti-feminist regime, that's what you are. Take the hat and the fucking tie off and get inside, we're in the middle of a meeting."

 

Jaimee considers, just for one moment, telling her to fuck off, but the door opens, and there's that smell of fags and booze again, but in the darkness she can see people, mostly women, some of them looking at her, most of them looking at the tall girl, watching her, eyes following her as she stalks back inside.

 

The wind blows up again, screeching through the narrow street. Jaimee pulls the door closed behind her.

 

2.

 

In summer, Jaimee turns seventeen. There's a family dinner tonight, which her brothers didn't get until their eighteenth, but Jaimee's dad's been treating her funny lately, watching her as if she might explode and rain disappointment down on them all like acid rain. As a child, she had the same freedom as her brothers, but once it occurred to her dad that his daughter was pretty much a grown woman now, down came the rules and regulations. No going out after dark, no spending time with boys, checking her breath for smoke or booze, checking her pockets for god-knows-what.

 

Thing is, Jaimee isn't stupid. She's been smoking since she was fourteen without getting caught, and her dad wouldn't be able to detect a couple of beers on her breath over the stench of whisky on his own.

 

She knows what else he's afraid of. She really isn't stupid, and even though the nuns try to convince them all that kissing boys will send them all to hell and that's all they need to know, she's got sex pretty much figured out. The horniness of a teenager is never to be underestimated, but while her classmates were getting caught on their knees or up the duff, Jaimee has perfected silent, furious, masturbation. She suspects that'll send her to hell too, but it won't get her pregnant, and she's a lot more scared of her daddy than the devil.

 

She's also perfected the art of only-sort-of-lying. She's convinced her mum (without actually saying so) that Melanie is the girl in her class with the red hair, and that her parents won't let her come around to anyone's home, simultaneously giving her a cover story for where she is after school, and providing her parents with another family to look down on ( _you've got to give kids some freedom_ , her dad said, sanctimoniously).

 

In actual fact, Mel is almost twenty and lives on her own in the world's smallest bedsit. There’s a double bed, a kitchen top with gas hob and sink, a tiny bathroom, and a couple of beanbags on the floor. But the room is at the top of the building, and if you climb out of the window, you can climb the fire escape a few steps onto the flat roof.

 

Mel has a work desk out there, where she usually sits with her notebooks and sketchpads, but today they haul up the beanbag and sit side-by-side in the sunshine.

 

“Seventeen,” Mel says, “is a weird fucking age. No one’s sure if you’re a child or a woman.”

 

Jaimee’s felt like a woman for quite a while now. Hard not to, when you walk into a lingerie shop and the old woman looks at you as if you’re there just to test her. They had to order something for her, specially tailor-made from Edinburgh. Her mother suggested she could go braless, like she did as a young woman, but added that was the reason Jaimee has seven brothers. Yet another implication that she has to do what’s expected with her body or else end up pregnant before she knows it.

 

Not that she’s really sure what _being a woman_ actually entails. Her dad has suggested several times that she ought to take the training to become a nun and work at the school, but she reckons that’s because he’s got a thing for Sister Nora, the deputy headmistress, and her mother’s idea of womanhood is contributing to the overpopulation of the planet, except not until you’re decently married.

 

Mel seems to think it’s all about something else. Jaimee isn’t sure.

 

“Did you know,” she says, taking a swig from a beer bottle, “that I got my name because they were expecting a boy? I was Jamie before I was born, they just changed the spelling because apparently the more vowels you cram in, the girlier it is. After seven sons they didn’t consider the possibility they might be getting a daughter. They dressed me in boys’ clothes because they already had all that stuff from my brothers. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

 

Mel gives her an odd look. “Is it?”

 

“The idea of boy or girl clothes for babies. I wore nothing but blue for five years, and I’ve still got tits and a cunt, right?”

 

“Glorious tits,” says Mel. “Well done on the tits.”

 

“Thank you.” Jaimee grins with all her teeth.

 

It’s a beautiful August day, the sky blue and clear from horizon to horizon, the air hot and a little balmy. Mel’s wearing shorts and a bikini top, her long, lean body warming in the sun. Jaimee’s in a green sundress, the shrug, tights, and sensible shoes her parents insist on left abandoned in the building’s stairwell. She wriggles her toes, loving the sun on her skin, and watches the birds wheeling overhead.

 

“Seventeen’s gonna be good,” she says.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Yep.”

 

“How’d you know?”

 

“Cause I’ve decided.”

 

“Decided what?”

 

“That it’s gonna be good, stupid.”

 

Mel accepts that with a laugh. She looks really alive today, Jaimee thinks, and actually she can’t remember seeing Mel in proper sunlight before. It’s always pubs or clubs or someone’s living room, or splashing through the rain… she looks amazing. Beautiful, in an odd way, slender, and pale, her skin bright and her eyes a pale green where Jaimee would have previously sworn they were blue.

 

“Good,” says Mel. “You gonna go to parties and smoke a joint and finally kiss a boy and let him finger you in the car before he takes you home? And whatever other shit seventeen year olds do?”

 

“No,” says Jaimee. She leans over and kisses Mel, softly, on the lips.

 

“Good,” says Mel again, and she grabs the edge of Jaimee’s beanbag and pulls it right up next to her own.

 

 3.

The day Mel tells Jaimee she’s going to London is the day before Jaimee’s mum’s house gets hit by lightening and catches fire.

 

Nobody’s hurt except for Jaimee’s sister-in-law, Susan, who spends a couple of days in hospital because of the smoke she breathed in, but the house is a mess, and a lot of their stuff is ruined. Jaimee would have thought she’d mourn the loss of her clothes and books, the few odds and ends of keepsakes, letters from friends, jewellery, records… but she doesn’t care.

 

The letters Mel’s written to her over the last three years are safely hidden under the floor in the unused shed at the bottom of the garden. She unearths them, and reads them over again, as if making sure every single sentence has survived intact.

 

She ought to help clean up, support her mother, take flowers to Susan, help Iain with the insurance company, or at least look as if she’s doing something useful, but all she can see is a very big, very clear sign. It’s probably not from god, but he’s never given her any signs at all, so she has to take what she can get.

 

The storms carry on through the week. At the weekend, Mel leaves with her entire life packed in one suitcase. Jaimee follows three days later.

 

When she arrives at King’s Cross, she’s still damp from Glasgow rain.

 

 4.

Mel’s changed a little, around the edges. She wears fitted trouser-suits and a single pair of silver earrings, and she’s grown her hair out to a sensible bob. The nose stud is long gone, the hole carefully hidden with concealer. Jaimee finds she has to change too. No more scruffy jeans or strappy dresses, it’s all blazers, knee-length skirts, and carefully ironed blouses from here on out.

 

She isn’t entirely sure why she does it, but one day, she shows up at the office wearing a shirt, tie, waistcoat, trousers and flat, mens’ style shoes, her hair pulled back in a stern bun. She gets a few funny looks, and one or two giggles from the other girls, but overall fails to make much of an impression, if that’s even what she hoped for.

 

Mel lasts until lunchtime when she grabs Jaimee by the tie and drags her out into the alleyway behind the building, where torrential rain is hammering on the metal bin lids and stirring the dirt into mud.

 

“It’s raining,” Jaimee points out.

 

“Shut up,” Mel snaps. She grabs hold of Jaimee’s jacket collar, shoves her up against the wall, and kisses her.

 

It’s been a while since they did this. Mel’s been seeing some bloke, and Jaimee’s working off the Catholic repression by going out and fucking someone different every other night. This feels a hundred times more thrilling – nobody’s ever compared to Mel, not even close.

 

Mel shoves a hand down Jaimee’s trousers, rubs her through her knickers; Jaimee gets a handful of Mel’s hair and pulls her in for another kiss, sliding her tongue between her lips, groaning into her mouth and grabbing for her waist. Mel’s so narrow, so wiry, but always buzzing with energy, always responsive whenever Jaimee touches her. Jamie slides a hand up her side, feeling the subtle curves of her body, cupping the softness of Mel’s breast with the palm of her hand. She shivers as Mel crooks her fingers, pushing as hard as she can into Jaimee’s body through damp cotton, but moves Mel’s hand away and pulls her whole body close.

 

Jaimee shoves a knee between Mel’s legs and ruts up against her thigh, and it’s enough, it’s plenty, the little voice in the back of her head telling _whatever_ , she’s got a change of clothes in the office, and this is more than worth it. She can barely see, barely breathe through the downpour, but nothing matters except for the heat in her belly and groin and thighs, and the way Mel moves against her, kissing her, wanting her…

 

After six years, Mel can make her come like they’re still teenagers, a shuddering, knee-trembling orgasm that makes her dizzy, after barely any time at all. Mel’s always needed a little more, so Jaimee opens her trousers, still panting and shuddering, and rubs the pads of her fingers against Mel’s clit.

 

That does it. Mel sighs against Jaimee’s neck, her release always something quieter than Jaimee’s, less of an explosion of nerve endings and more of a gentle relaxation, a temporary reprieve from the chaos in her head. She sags into Jaimee, and they hold onto each other, catching their breath, Jaimee pressing little kisses to Mel’s cool skin.

 

“Work to do,” Mel says, after a moment, pushing Jaimee away.

 

They’re both saturated to the skin, but they both have spare clothes, and they agree to say they’ve been arguing out here It’s easy to believe; they often argue, these days. There’s no one else either of them can push at without hurting or losing or fucking something up. The more they fight, the stronger they get.

 

This is the memory that will always surface, unbidden, in Jaimee’s mind with the smell of the rain.

 

 5.

 In the end, there’s the snow.

 

It falls thick and fast, piling heavy on rooftops, parked cars, trees, and anything else that stays still long enough. Jaimee’s windscreen wipers and car heater can barely keep on top of it, and the road is so slick that she’s very nearly late. It doesn’t help that she takes a wrong turn somewhere, and ends up grinding through Maidstone town centre in rush-hour traffic.

 

But when Jaimee finally finds East Sutton, Mel is there, standing outside the big, brown-brick building, with her bag over her shoulder. It’s been five years since Jaimee saw her, five years back in Glasgow, back to newspapers, and they say that returning to a place isn’t the same as never leaving, and they’re right. It’s worse. Editing’s a bitch, and without Mel there’s just no fucking fun in any of it.

 

She jams the handbrake hard, grabs the keys, practically falls out of the car and skids across the badly-gritted driveway, saved only by a decent pair of boots. Mel takes a couple of hesitant steps towards her.

 

She’s changed again. Short-cropped hair, and jeans that hang loose around her hips, a grey fleece that’s nowhere near warm enough. Her eyes are blue today, like the icicles clinging to the roof of the prison building behind her. She’s pushed a gold stud back through the old piercing in the side of her nose, but she doesn’t look twenty-one again. She looks fucking _ninety_ , thin and tired, red beneath the eyes, no make-up, no power, not much left beyond her precious dignity.

 

When Jaimee hugs her, Mel sighs, lets Jaimee take her slight weight, wraps her arms around her shoulders. She’s shivering, thinner and colder than Jaimee’s ever felt her before. She could count each rib through the thin fleece, if the idea didn’t make her shudder with dread.

 

“Come on, old girl,” she murmurs.

 

Mel follows her to the car, leaving their footprints behind in the freshly fallen snow.


End file.
